


Bath Tangle

by Boji



Category: 18th & 19th Century CE RPF, Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005), Georgette Heyer Novels
Genre: M/M, Originally Posted on LiveJournal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-07-29
Updated: 2006-07-29
Packaged: 2017-10-06 05:41:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/50270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Boji/pseuds/Boji
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From futuristic battlefields to Regency ballrooms, Jack has always been a survivor. He's not the conman he used to be, but he makes a passable dandy. If only he could stop thinking about where he's been and the man who left him behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bath Tangle

**Author's Note:**

> Set some months after _The Parting of the Ways_ \- in Jack's timeline - and after the Doctor bids a final farewell to Rose in _Doomsday_. Spoilers also abound for the James Purefoy period costume drama _"Brummell that Charming Man" _which aired on BBC4 back in June.

## Bath Tangle

 

The ritual - for that's what it was, played itself out in the same way each evening. After he'd tied his cravat, making sure the Wyndham Fall - or some other design in pleating, was throttling him just so, Jack would walk over to the dresser, unlock the mahogany cigar box and trail his fingers over an iPod click-wheel. And with that light touch bestowed, he would offer up a silent plea to a fallen God. It was the last stage in a complex dance that began with bathing and dressing.

"Play the hand you're dealt," Jack told himself sternly, staring hard at his own reflection. He stood at a slight angle, favouring his profile. The tailor had done a wonderful job with his navy coat, the breeches that were clinging to his muscular thighs like jodpuhrs didn't have a crease on them and surprisingly his boots were softer and more comfortable than his much lamented biker boots which had been destroyed by rain, sludge and the energy signature of a temporal rift.

Jack hadn't washed ashore in Imperial Rome, but the truism of doing as others did was as apt in Bath as anywhere else he'd ever found himself - which was why he was aping a pack-rat and a clothes horse. Last time he'd had to change his outfit he'd just searched through the TARDIS' wardrobe racks for jeans that weren't too short in the leg or too long in the crotch. Jack remembered all too well how he'd wiggled his bum suggestively while Rose had giggled, scoffed handfuls of popcorn, and awarded him points. It stung that those memories were now as relevant as the black iPod - that once longed for token of style just a technological memento-mori from a life utterly out of his reach.

The iPod had survived the shot he'd taken to the chest. It had survived the slam-shock of Jack's rejuvenation and even made it through the hazard of suicidal stupidity, which was the only way Jack could describe his most recent temporal journey. It hadn't survived his groveling in mud and rain. Reduced to sentimental junk it now sat next to the TARDIS key, resting in a rectangular wooden box, secured away from a world that had yet to shake hands with anything Jack recognised as technology. Not that out of sight was out of mind - which was why once a day Jack gave into the compulsion and let himself stare at the only two items he had left from the life he'd once lived.

Then he set off for a hard night's play.

In another place and time that phrase might have been an invitation to lose himself in the pounding beat of a techno rave, or wait and watch while breathless grunts and the slap of sweat-slick skin against skin reverberated off a bathhouse wall. Once high stakes would have been wagered in colourful, creased bank notes and credit chips, while he chalked a pool cue. Now? It meant Faro or Macao - Roulette or any of the other high-stakes games on which Jack was staking his continued existence.

 

"Luck be a lady tonight." Staying in tune Jack exhaled the lyric and tried not to remember that Sinatra wouldn't sign the refrain for another two centuries. The glass of champagne he was holding had gone flat, but Jack wasn't going to gesture for another. He needed to stay sharp, needed his wits about him. Stood to the side of a sparsely filled drawing room given over to gaming, Jack watched a cluster of men in the opening stages of play. Those with a half-fanned clutch of cards in their hands. Those who watched a white ball made from polished bone bounce from one numbered slot to the next.

A young man, with a disdainful expression on his classically attractive face, looked up from a hand of cards, grinned at Jack mischievously, and then turned his head slightly to say something to the elegant, distinguished-looking man friend who'd been watching the play unfold from over the younger man's shoulder. He in-turn raised an eyebrow in Jack's direction, then swallowed a knowing grin together with a mouthful of champagne. Gordon George and George Bryan. Byron and Brummell. Elegance and eccentricity.

Top and pushy bottom.

Jack snorted, a half-swallowed sip of flat champagne tickling his nose. He needed to stop thinking in late Twentieth Century terms. They had no place here where sodomy was punishable by a hangman's noose. Of course, it had to be proven and if you were affluent enough, had enough influence in polite society - or better still were friends of the Regent, then you were protected from malicious rumour. Usually. But the shadow Beckford's scandal had cast was long and deep.

She'd called him pushy, Rose had. Even gone so far as to tell her once-and-possibly-future- boyfriend Mickey that Jack was a typically pushy bottom, as if there was such a thing. But then, each age had it's stereotypes and it's slang. Its leaders and its misfits. It's Brummell and Byron.

With a nod to the former, Jack turned and headed out to do a quick reccy. True, the danger that could threaten was most likely boredom or bankruptcy, but Jack knew he'd feel more comfortable when he'd scoped out all viable exits. The permanent itch of restlessness that he'd shaken off in the months he'd travelled with the Doctor and Rose was back, crawling between Jack's shoulder blades like a small but venomous spider. Experience had taught him that it either spelt trouble - in capitals for emphasis, or else the itch heralded a change in the weather. And both possibilities could be a problem given the right circumstances.

The itch hadn't abated by the time he'd walked the perimeter of the Georgian Assembly Rooms. Preoccupied, Jack drifted back in the direction of the ballroom. Dancing was always a possible distraction and if that failed, watching society flirt and fawn and fumble their way across the dance floor was at least as amusing as any episodic reality television he'd ever zapped past. Girls with carefully styled hair. Married women with their jewels and assets on display. Young men fresh from their regiment seeking a wife, or someone else's wife for mistress - Jack gazed at the dancing couples, snatches of conversations - some laced with laughter, some with sarcasm, clearly audible despite the lively music. The room was aglow with warmth and colour, thanks to a multitude of branch candles and candelabra. So, with a little imagination Jack could _almost_ fool himself that he was watching a film - maybe that costume thing Rose had dragged him to see twice. But the air was thick with cloying perfumed scent which utterly failed to disguise the smell of stale sweat and that was proof enough that he wasn't waking up any time soon.

"Big surprise..." Jack sighed and tried to rotate one shoulder slightly, despite the tight cut of his coat. It didn't help the itch that stubbornly persisted. "Fate's a fickle bitch."

As an elegant woman in a muslin cap turned her head to look at him, Jack wondered if the last word had carried over the sound of strings and piano. "It's always the little things. Two hundred aeons from _what's your sign?_ Does that make this my past-life or a future one?" he said to himself, hoping his swearing hadn't been clearly audible over the precise stamp of dance-steps on the parquet floor.

When he was introduced now, it was as Captain Jack Harkness, recently returned from the Peninsula. Gossip, or the on-dit of the day would have people believe that he had recently regained his health after having been in the thick of battle. That he'd recently come into a sizeable portion gained through investments or from slave-tilled plantations. And there was talk of a late lamented heiress-wife who had died of an assortment of things, depending on who was telling the tale. Illusion seemed to gaze upon reality through a quizzing glass. Jack was reputed to be a card shark, adventurer, gentleman, dandy. Specifically, a whip, a Corinthian, a sure-fire member of Waiter's - his friendship with Brummell, all the entree he'd needed. It was a role, and one that Jack clung to, playing it to the hilt. But he missed progress that was lacking everywhere, in any form that he could recognise. Here, young women walked in the park with their maids, mother's or a chaperone, marriage was the only game in town, aside from those played at a card table.

 

A tall, broad-shouldered man had slid through the loitering crowd and came to stand beside Jack, jostling to lean against the same patch of wall that Jack had lain claim to. And the whole room stilled momentarily to watch him while pretending they were doing no such thing. Playing to his audience Mr. George the Beau Brummell crossed his legs at the ankle, twisting his foot just so. Candlelight glinted off the golden tassles on the front of polished hessian boots. To people who hadn't been born seven or so centuries from where Jack currently found himself, Brummell looked elegant, observant and somewhat bored. To Jack's mind, George the Beau Brummell's expertly tousled appearance made him look as if he'd just been sucked off behind the bar in a nightclub to the sound of a pounding electro-beat.

"Don't tell me that you found some chit pleasing enough, here?" Brummell asked, cutting off Jack's musings, just as he was remembering how he'd made the other man come, just by kissing and licking the backs of his thighs and the insides of his knees. "They're dull as ditch-water, the lot of them. Not an aspiring incomparable among them. But then what do you expect with the season over and all of us retired from town to partake of the waters?"

"I thought the Assemblies were..." Jack paused. Was all the rage the right thing to say, he wondered? Or was it, _of the first order_? Jack sighed heavily and ran his fingers roughly though his carefully styled hair. George glared at him pointedly. Jack grinned, barely resisting the impulse to stick his tongue out at the other man.

"A step or two down from Almacks' dear boy, but luckily my charismatic Jack you're not one for the marriage mart. Nor the marriage bed, not yet eh? " A twist of a hand and a pinch of snuff was being sharply inhaled, the move precise and elegant. Like everything that George did.

Jack wasn't sure that Brummell had actually spouted the immortal phrase that clothes made the man, but he definitely lived the motto to the hilt. Appearance was second to absolutely nothing, not even royal command.

"I trust that none of the insipid creatures dancing the Cotillion has enticed your interest. After all my dear Jack, not one of these young ladies is worth the time it would take to compromise her, even a little. Not to mention the lines of flattering lies you'd have to compose. I find myself fatigued even to contemplate it. Snuff?" The question was asked with a hint of a smile as a small pinch of blended powder was caught between thumb and index fingers and sharply inhaled.

"It's too early for me to start inhaling." Jack drawled. He'd done lines of coke off the back of lap-dancer, off discarded tour programs, and backstage passes. He'd snorted lines off the top of toilet cisterns, just before he'd felt the burning stretch of ecstasy as someone slid in just a little too roughly. Compared that, snuff was vastly over-rated.

"This is one of those moments where George, if he were but here, would swear you're implying a great deal more than you're saying," Brummell said, his sarcasm tinged with thoughtfulness.

"Really George?" Jack asked injecting his tone with such enough suggestion so as to be overtly flirtatious.

"Really Jack. Not that your air of mystery doesn't lend itself to your being a palpable hit." The voice drawled in Jack's ear as the man leant down slightly, his movement controlled, elegant. As always.

Muscular and trim, Brummell was undisputedly attractive. Ironically, in his mid thirties he was considered to be in his past his prime by the chattering mama's inveigling to get their daughter's dance card filled appropriately. Yet his opinion was courted as vigorously as a favourable match for their debutante darlings. His brash magnetism, his confidence and bare-faced bravado would have been enough to interest Jack, enough without the influence the other man commanded.

"We're of a like mind George. I'm just playing to my strengths," Jack said, exhaling slightly as he tried not to laugh.

"Hence your persistence in titillating my curiosity." With a flourished movement of his hand, Brummell dismissed an approaching servant bearing a salver. "Sherry's dreadful. Remind me to order champagne when the gaming stakes finally get interesting." He paused and when he started speaking again, his quiet tone was utterly serious. "We've gathered that you fought on the Penninsula, though George is of a mind that something altogether mysterious is the only answer to your predicament on the night we met. But then, Byron is apt to imagine that Lord Morpheus himself tossed you out of bed to land in the mud and muck. Whatever you're hiding, is it truly so dreadful my friend?"

Unable to stop the images of that dreadful night shattering his composure, Jack bit down into the side of his mouth and tasted blood. There'd been blood in his mouth that night - the night he'd gone chasing after his second death. The night Jack had met the two Georges. He'd almost been run down by a curricle as he crawled on all fours clawing through the mud, looking for the key to a time machine that had long since left him behind.

Later, when the chill of that unimaginable day and night had been leached from his bones by a warm fireside bath and half a bottle of brandy it occurred to Jack that his leather pants and his Doc Martens were all that had saved him from hypothermia and starvation. The moonlight breaking through the clouds on that rain drenched, muddy stretch of Welsh soil had possibly displayed his leather clad butt to perfection, making sculpture out of frozen, clammy flesh. But Jack knew he'd never ask outright why the racing curricle had stopped, why his skull hadn't been easily split by a wheel spinning in the mud, or by a glancing blow from a metallic shoehorn that would have been anything but lucky. Instead, when two pairs of hands had cut, yanked and peeled him out of the clothes he'd died in, he'd accepted the queries about his ruined clothing - shoes, waistcoat, t-shirt, and sent up a prayer to Gods he no longer believed in that the clothes on his back had proved both fascinating and scandalous to his rescuers.

"George, you'd accuse me of telling tall tales, even if I did reveal all," Jack said, suddenly somber. "You'd think me a regular Scheherazade."

"Does your tale span a thousand and one nights?" Brummell asked, with forced flippancy.

"If you wish it to." Jack smiled wryly, "Actually, even if you don't, it probably does."

"And would that dreadful night in the Welsh countryside be the first or the last of those nights?"

Jack swallowed. Emotions he refused to name fluttered, then tightened in his stomach in reply to Brummell's simple question. But there was no getting away from the fact that Jack hadn't expected to revive after taking a hit from a Dalek at point blank range. He hadn't expected wake only to find himself entombed in a nightmare, his heroic sacrifice a ticket to purgatory. The floors of the gaming platform where Jack had died had been slick with blood and puke. Human bodies lying strewn across the decking like discarded, broken toys. He'd walked the floors. Stepped over an empty shoe. Retreated to the Big Brother house. Seeking anaethesia in a bottle, Jack had gone searching for supplies.

Fumbling around in abandoned lockers and junk filled drawers, he'd hit the jackpot and found pills. Blue ones and yellow ones. White ones printed with hearts and smiley faces. A handful chased down with a slug of scavenged gin and the bright green sofa he'd been lying on had dipped and shifted, turning to green jello beneath him. He'd lain there, listening to the soothing hum of anti-grav that was all that kept the metallic space-worthy cylinder from falling into the radiation that blanketed the earth. Jack still remembered that the thought of jelly had triggered a memory of a red-headed health-worker who'd brought jelly to his bedside then last time he'd taken a shot to the shoulder. He'd forgotten what century he'd been shot in - if they'd dug shrapnel out of his shoulder barbarically or beamed it out painlessly, but he remembered that the pretty nurse had had freckled shoulder blades. Jack had kissed them, then licked her out in a hospital elevator, just moved the cotton crotch of her cotton panties aside and feasted. A better gift than flowers and chocolate, in thanks for food and care and shelter.

It was a practice that hadn't failed him yet, which was part of the reason he'd kissed both George's that first night when they'd crawled into bed beside him, body warmth the only thing between him and vicious illness.

Fired and fortified with several hits of alcohol and a handful of chemical sweeties, his mind blown, he'd unscrewed the control panels for the Big Brother transmat, yanked half the wiring out the wall and cross twisted the different coloured connections into something that almost looked like a friendship bracelet. Then, dressed in a orange hazmat suit that he's discovered neatly packed away on the second level of the game station, he'd waited for a radiation storm to pass and beamed himself down. Not that he'd been aiming to scatter his atoms across Earth's radiation cloud. No, he'd had a purpose, a destination. Cardiff centre had been a safe bet and that's what he'd chosen. There'd been no guarantee that the rift would still be open, that the doctor's sealing of the Gelph's trans-dimmensional doorway hadn't held like a coat of sonic super-glue, but Jack had walked towards where he remembered it had once been. Arms outstretched he walked towards his expected second death the way he'd stood before his first.

He still remembered the conviction that he'd either die yelling his rage out to a time traveller deafened by distance, or else he'd walk out to find himself by the Millennium convention centre. He'd visualised the place, held it in his mind like a series of co-ordinates and some how ended up in an England that had yet to experience the glory of empire, an England that had yet to triumph at the Battle of Waterloo.

"You could say that I walked out in rain and back in rain. That I out-walked the furthest city light," Jack said slowly, still lost in ugly reminiscence that made him shudder. His stomach churned.

"Is George composing again?" Brummell words were tinged with exaggerated patience.

"Probably," Jack replied, vaguely remembering that Byron's genius would be printed, bound and flying off bookshelves sooner rather then later. "But, I didn't lift it from his pen scratchings. It was damn lucky you didn't run me a-ground my dear George," Jack said, trying to shake off memories and a morose mood.

"Fortunate indeed. After all your skill with the reins is only surpassed by your skill at the tables. And due to some deluded notion, you seem to be interested in vouching for my vowels." Brummell looked discomforted, honour winning out ahead of an arms-length of debt. "'Tis most generous of you."

"I keep expecting George to take affront."

There was little difference between the life he was currently living and a mission. One that had gone FUBAR as the Yanks used to say, back when he'd wet his whistle and his dick at the Savoy. The remembered slang brought a slight smile to Jack's face. Had the TARDIS smoothed accents when she'd translated? Had she dulled other people's perception of cultural differences? Was he still sheltered by her benevolent protection? Or had that passed it's sell by date too? Etiquette had always been a game of codes and symbols, yet here in Austen's England, language and nuance were as intricate and complex as the dance steps being played out in front of him.

Repairing a glitch in the TARDIS mainframe had been far easier, even if the schematics had looked like an artist's drugged dream. But then _she'd_ translated and he'd _known_ just where to place his fingers, just which wire to coax, which connection to push against with a firm press of his thumb. And when he'd been in doubt, that gently sarcastic voice had been right there, over his shoulder or in his ear, dropping a hint or two with a bright smile and a light touch. He'd felt safe. He'd belonged. And then he'd been discarded for offal on a metal riveted floor. Siegfreid Sassoon, Jack reflected, had said it best, glum heroes sped 'up the line to death'. He'd never wanted to be a better man, just wanted the Doctor to be proud of him, if he couldn't be proud _with_ him.

Jack exhaled slowly, turned his mind from what he'd lost and focused on what Brummell was saying.

"The Regent's of the belief that, as I spend more time abroad with you, I see less of Byron. That brilliant boy worries him. My mistake for stating plainly that I found the boy beautiful."

"I thought all you did with the Prince was read Shakespeare." A grin spread easily across Jack's face.

"'Tis true, although there is riding and gaming...

"Is he still watching you dress?" Jack asked.

"No. Though that was... amusing. " The corner of Brummell's mouth twitched as he half swallowed a laugh.

Jack dropped his voice to a whisper. "Arousing?"

"Watching myself in the looking glass while being looked upon? Yes. We'll have to attempt that one evening. But not in the morning dear Jack. Bathing and dressing takes all ones attention after all."

 

For as long as Jack could remember he'd always travelled light. Carried a change of clothing, three changes of underwear and seven kinds of weaponry, but not much else. Discarded must have love-tokens and lovers at space-ports and train-hubs. He'd learnt that the hard way. Stuff got slimed and ripped. Things that he cared about, well they'd been known to get caught in the blowback from an explosion. So, when he sought out the finer things in life - pretty boys in leather shorts, access all areas passes to good rock gigs, veuve cliquot champagne or cinnamon flavoured lube, he only clutched at what he could enjoy then walk away from. But that was before he succeeded in stealing the Chula racer. He'd taken that success as an omen of better days to come. Then he'd gotten in with a couple of Spiv's, back during the Blitz and stored booze, the good stuff mind - and boxes of cigarettes on board. Traded them for food or a fuck-free timeshare with someone's blanket and pillow. But he still travelled light. Absolutely no photos, those same changes of underwear.

Somehow, after his fourth month tinkering around under the TARDIS console, on the morning he found the Doctor perched cross legged on a stool in the galley eating Jack's favourite sugar free raspberry jam with a long spoon, it finally occurred to Jack that he had found somewhere he could call home. That was when he slowly started picking up things in space markets, items he'd read about, heard about, borrowed off short-term lovers, much like other people borrowed books and DVD's.

The iPod had been bought dirt cheap in Japan, two centuries after it's conception and been handed to Jack across the table in an automated sushi bar, with a napkin and a tap on the knuckles from a chopstick that was just as black. Rose had joked that the iPod was a cheap knock off, then spent most of her time begging for a return trip to the same shopping arcade so she could pick up a pink one. But that was after the Doctor had detailed Jack's with the sonic screwdriver, making it compatible with the TARDIS mainframe. Rock and Roll, crappy processed pop and songs that sounded like dolphins mating to a techno beat had ended up on permanent shuffle. The iPod had spent as much time tucked up in the Doctor's leather jacket as it had in Jack's own hip pocket. The smell of leather had seeped, comfortingly, into the designer casing.

"...I ponder I shan't play Macao at your table."

It was only when he started listening again that Jack realised he'd once again tuned out most of what Brummell had been saying. "Don't want to ask the Prince to honour your wagers, if you lose to me?" Jack asked.

"You'd call them in?" Brummell looked genuinely surprised.

Jack lowered his voice slightly. "Nightly. From the press of your lips."

"You, my Captain, are as reckless as the other feckless fool who's regaling our friends with nonsensical verse in the other room." Brummell looked over his shoulder, then turned back to stare into Jack's bright gaze. "Or are you in your cups?"

"Hardly." Jack drained his champagne and tried to swallow down the tightness pressing against his rib cage.

Reckless, was that what he was?

He'd jerked back to life clinging to fragment of a memory, to that momentary flutter of a tongue against his own. A stolen kiss from a man as confident, arrogant and unique as the man whose bed he now shared, on occaison. Two hundred years too early to ask George for a dance, Jack found himself blatantly staring at a young girl who'd been looking at him shyly from across from the dancefloor all evening. She was a red head, unfashionably so by Brummell's exacting standards, although she was pale skinned. For a moment Jack seriously entertained the idea of asking her to dance. Or possibly Waltz. When had that been introduced to Almacks? Not for another couple of years if he remembered correctly and Bath was more provincial than London so it didn't look as if a Waltz was on the cards.

"You're more self-involved than I have ever known you to be," Brummell said, half-amused, half-caustic. "Better stay away from the tables tonight Jack, lest your luck doesn't hold." Brummell drawled, gesturing for a young boy carrying a tray of drinks to come forward. "He's a pretty thing. Think Byron's noticed"?

Breeches, buckled shoes and a powdered wigs didn't hide the narrowness of the boys wrists nor the girlish curve of the boys jawline. Jack shuddered. At best the boy was fourteen. He'd never been to really repugnant places on Twentieth Century Earth where beautiful boys and girls sold themselves for a bowl of rice. And most other places he'd been, well there were galactic laws, penal codes. Prisons. Resequencing of offenders. Though on some worlds they still married young. Died young too.

Brummell's voice dropped to a quiet whisper "Your mouth is a living inducement to sin. You're as, if not more, skilled than any woman ever mentioed in Harris's lists so you'll forgive me if I state my fervent hope that you're not recalling ... unpleasantries."

Jack started, then caught himself and tried to will down the sudden shudder.

"No, please." A raised hand and a slight shaking of George's head stopped him from replying. "I maintain that your obvious skill with firearms and a pack of cards has always held you in good stead. We are, after all, masterpieces of our own creation are we not? Born each morning with the perfect fold of a cravat, rejuvinated each evening with a drink and a winning hand.

"Performance art." Jack said a rush of affection fluttering in his belly like hunger.

"Performance as art." George repeated the phrase slowly. "I like it. You should tell Byron, whom we should undoubtedly rescue from his damnable streak at the Macao table prior to the Prince's arrival."

"The Prince, the Poet and the Dandy."

"The three George's," Brummell mused. "We sound like a common inn."

Jack's stomach growled in response, in turn reminded Brummell that - as he put it, they hadn't supped.

 

They left Byron winning a hand and walked through the quiet streets of pre- dawn Bath in the direction of their rented lodgings in the Crescent. A warm summer, marked by spits of rain, had given way to a burgeoning chill, despite the fact that September had yet to break. Slowly the social circus would depart, leaving rented accommodation for the blazing hearth's of their London homes. And where glittering laugh-filled nights at the theatre and opulent games of chance beckoned, Jack knew he and George would follow.

"You're not going to advise me to seek my own bed." Jack asked, pleased that the sentence construction came out right.

"Hardly. Anyway George will probably stumble home and fall into it." Brummell's booted footsteps echoed quietly off the cobbled streets. "And knowing Byron, he'll fall into bed in his boots. I despair at the state of his wardrobe."

"Clothes maketh the man." Jack murmured quietly. "Did you say that or did someone else?"

"Don't recall with such a head, but truer words were never spoken."

"They hide the man too," Jack said, recalling all the banked power sheathed in faded black jeans and a v-neck jumper.

"Nothing is worse than affectation, power, paint and wigs dear fellow. Not even a billious attack of colour on a pasty faced girl barely escaped from the schoolroom." Brummell slowed, pivoted flamboyantly on one booted foot and reached out to tap Jack gently on his thigh with his walking cane. "Take my advice, dear Jack and only marry if the pot is sweet enough."

"And in the meantime?" Jack asked.

"Tell me again, what were you about, before we met on the road?" It was obvious from the tilt of Brummell's head and the eyebrow that couldn't help but raise slightly, that he was genuinely curious.

"I was following a fool."

George laughed. "No matter what campaign you fought in, it's the same with most commanding officers. And they think I sold out because they moved the regiment from Brighton to Manchester."

"Allergic to the north, George?" Jack asked.

"Wretched place. Damp and dank and that accent."

"Oh I don't know, sounds rather nice." Jack exhaled. If he focused he could still hear snatches of words spoken in just that accent. They were fading though like a water stain evaporating off a length of silk. "Everywhere has a north, you know?"

They walked on silence and Jack had just about persuaded himself that he'd side-stepped George's curiosity, when the question was asked. Worse it was asked directly.

"You were set upon. The night we met, were you not?"

"It wasn't highwaymen, nor brigands of any nature that you'd understand."

"And if you were to spin me a tale of your travels?" Brummell asked.

"That my dear George would be the story of a gamester who fell in with a God."

"Attractive Olympian?"

"Veritably. Prone to ennui and melancholia. But ... unique." Brummell was teasing, and therein lay the bitter irony. Even if Jack found the words to describe half of what he'd experienced, he'd never be believed. All that was left to him was transient pleasure and fleeting oblivion, if he was lucky and played his cards right.

* * *

 

Dawn had just warmed into lighter day, the morning Jack woke restlessly. Snatches of a half-remembered dream teased around the edges of Jack's mind like a breeze tickling his scalp. He clutched at a faint memory of a girl who'd giggled as she'd come. He'd never tickled Rose. Hadn't kissed the curve of her naked breast, or sucked on a pert, girlish pink nipple. Jack imagined that he'd have blown raspberries on Rose's belly button, if he'd ever gotten her into bed. Not that he'd really wanted to. In Jack's dream the girl's giggle had sounded the way he imagined sunflowers might, if only he could hear their frequency. He'd never asked the Doctor if flowers whispered to him, or if understood the lyrics on those downloaded songs that sounded like dolphin rap.

Jack lay next to George.

Someone's hand rested on someone else's bicep, ankles pressed together haphazardly. Lazy entanglement, that's what their relationship appeared to be - and it was a relationship. Jack was fascinating to the other man, and in turn fond of and thankful for him.

Maybe that was the problem, Jack thought to himself, maybe he'd never fascinated the Doctor. He'd probably been as easy to read as Rose in one of her moods. Flirty, where she was sulky and petulant. Maybe they'd both been annoying as insects as they'd buzzed around the mercurial man wanting his attention, favour and time. Jack rolled over and punched the pillow, hard. No matter how he willed himself to dream of the Doctor, the images escaped his sleeping mind. And all Jack was left with where fading memories - the smell of well worn leather, brilliant eyes that burned brighter than a supernova, agile hands that caresssed a console and soothed worlds with a sonic screwdriver. And soon those reminiscences, frotted from days he didn't have the tech or the means to recapture, those precious few memories would fade like sandcastles dragged away by the tide.

"G' back t'sleep Jack." George's mumble was half muffled by the pillow.

 

When he shook his head off the pillow, some indeterminate time later, Jack knew he'd dosed - dreamt of that longed for celebratory screech of unique technology, which heralded arrival or departure, for he woke with a heavier heart. A light weight was trapping one foot under the bedclothes. He kicked out at George with his other foot, his toes meeting muscular calf, but his current lover didn't move. Rolling over, Jack sat up. A coat had been laid across the bottom of the bed. Jack touched one of the sleeves and was just realising how unlikely it was that their valet would have come into the room to lie a new coat across the bed, when a young man walked across the room. His footsteps squeaked slightly and in the early morning light and Jack could clearly tell that the soles of his shoes were made of rubber.

Rubbing one of his eyes with the back of his fingers, Jack stared at the young man looking back at him.

Light brown hair, cheeky grin, a skittering yet observant gaze.

Even if he hadn't been carrying the now unlocked, open cigar box- the TARDIS key and the iPod's view screen both glowing with exuding power, Jack would have known. Even if the shoes hadn't been rather funky bright pink converse all-stars...

Jack would have known.

There was just something in those eyes, something in the tilt of his head and the restless, elegant motion of the other man' hands. Jack propped himself up on his elbows and swept his gaze over the gangly man standing at the end of the bed. Pinstripes had replaced denim, converse all-stars - doc martens and the hair was longer, softer, framing a cuter almost boyish face. But it was still undoubtedly the Doctor.

"I regenerated," he said simply, by way of a greeting.

"Really? Could have fooled me. Hate what you've done with the ears." Oddly, Jack was surprised by the wave of anger that swelled up together with his traitorous, enthusiastic prick. "If you and Rose dropped by for chips, you're two hundred years too early. Or four months too late."

"I wasn't sure you wanted me to wake you." The words - spoken with care, in almost elocution english, hung in the room.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me!" Jack hissed, not wanting to wake George. He looked back over his shoulder at the man who was still sleeping soundly.

A hand, more slender and somehow delicate than the one Jack remembered, gestured across at the sleeping man still sharing the bed. "You looked... peaceful."

"Did I look peaceful when I was dead, Doctor? How did I look to you then?" Jack moved briskly, smoothly kneeling up on one knee. He climbed quickly out from under the bedclothes. It was better to ignore the pained guilty expression that had marked the Doctor's face for a long moment. Jack picked up a white muslin shirt and slid his arms into the billowing sleeves. Crossed his ams and turned to face the man in the brown suit. "You look like a poor man's Fox Mulder."

A bright grin broke out across that face, in reply to that line. "I missed you too, Jack" The Doctor smiled broadly, his mouth now full of perfectly white teeth.

"You left me for dead." Jack knew his tone was as cutting as Brummell's when the other man was looking to utterly demolish someone.

"You were dead."

"Were, are, will be, what the fucks the difference? All that matters was that I came too..."

"And I'd staggered off to die without you?" Jack could almost hear the Mancunian accent that wasn't thickening this man's voice.

"You save Rose?" Jack snapped.

"Then? Yes. She's tucked up in another reality with her mum now. With Pete, Mickey and the baby." At the startled look on Jack's face he continued, "Jackie's baby. Should do Rose good that. Being someone's sister."

"You miss her?" Jack asked, trying to bank down some of his festering anger. After all it wasn't Rose's fault that he'd followed the Doctor into the mouth of hell and been left behind.

"It's always that way, for an unbearable moment. And I don't look back." The Doctor's words were solemn and yet there he was, standing on a pale unvarnished wood floor staring at Jack, his face a mosaic of flittering emotions. Almost as if he himself were a kaleidoscope and each syllable brought a new emotional reading into focus.

"You're looking." Jack said. The muslin shirt he'd pulled on hung open off his shoulders, and it occurred to Jack that he probably looked like a toss between a Caravaggio and an extra from a porn film. His cock was still half hard, bouncing slightly in the slight chill that lingered in the bedroom.

"You're not supposed to be here." The Doctor sounded surprisingly petulant.

"You telling me to phone home?" Jack asked with a sardonic grin. "That's a piss poor apology for being late. Which isn't to say that I won't forgive you. Eventually." Jack's smile settled into something easier, something warmer.

"After you buy me that drink you owe me?" the Doctor asked.

"You finally going to tell me what you have against.... dancing?"

"The man you were cuddling up to, ends up a syphilitic ruin."

"I didn't exactly arrive with a handful of options." Jack said, shrugging his shoulders.

"I came back."

"Took you long enough!"

"Listen, this, whatever this is, I don't do this!" The Doctor slammed the cigar box shut and cradled it in his arms, awkwardly. "Not when I crawled out of the war torn corner of the universe I'd barely made it out from. Not when Jackie stung her tongue down my throat and coped a feel, not when Sarah-Jane popped up out of nowhere with as much energy and spirit as she ever had, but with her time running out faster than sand from a smashed hour glass." Words spilled out almost uncontrolably. Fueled by anger, by passion. Jack should see that the Doctor's steady hands shook. "Hell - not even when Rose cried herself sick for months. Stupid girl got half the TARDIS sucked into her head so we're all dreaming of Juliet topping herself. Had to go say goodbye like a good boy and then I show up here just in time for you to let me know, what? That it's too little too late? You're happier in a world without hot and cold running lube? Want to give me back my TARDIS key? What?"

"Why?" Jack asked.

"Why what?" A slender fingered hand messed with tousled unruly hair.

"Why did you miss me? Why have you sonic'ed Brummell to sleep? " Jack asked. And then that bright smile that had lit his days was back. ""Just... why?"

"The Tardis sings when you hotwire the console, you flirt with prison guards on thirty two worlds like no one else I've ever seen and you make the best peach and green pepper omelettes. Are those reasons enough for you?"

"Is this because I died and came back to life?"

"What?"

"Am I still human?" Jack spat the question out.

It was just this side of possible Jack thought, staring at the Doctor's stunned expression, that he hadn't entertained the possibility that the nano-genes had kicked in and repaired the damage blasted through Jack by that last Dalek soldier. That the Doctor had forgotten about the healer genes that swam through Jack's blood stream like a benevolent virus, one that had possibly brought him back to life without condemning him to existence as an animated corpse.

Legs suddenly trembling he sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. "This is where you're meant to rattle off a theory or three and make tea."

It wasn't about getting into the Doctor's faded jeans, or pin-stripe pants. It hadn't been about his knobbly knees, or the smooth skin of his lower back. Oh, Jack was curious. Wanted, longed, craved to see what a time-lord tasted like, brimming with life and power and possibility - but more than anything Jack wanted to see if the Doctor might reach for Jack's hand, just once.

"Put my coat on Jack." The Doctor said. "And we'll go home."

"What about Rose?" Jack asked, his brow creasing. Confused he turned back to look at the still sleeping Brummell. He'd mapped and licked the man's hip bones. Rolled over for a plate of food and timeshare of the man's valet.

"After I..." the Doctor paused, shook his head, then continued. "Rose and I swanned around for a bit. Had a kind of gap year with the odd bount of chaos and destruction chucked in for good measure."

Jack nodded.

"Queen Victoria drew up mandates and I probably changed the course of human history. Again. All because Rose was naked by Victorian standards and was her usual cheeky self to boot." Jack watched the Doctor rub his face with his hands briskly. "Then suddenly Britain's thousand years of peace are looking more totalitarian than anything I'd call freedom... Rose never called me on stuff. Not important stuff."

"Didn't know enough, hadn't done enough," Jack said quietly.

"It's never enough," the Doctor said quietly.

"Never?"

"Not so far."

Jack pulled on the Doctor's coat and belted it shut. He knew he should be feeling less like an excited schoolboy and more like a flasher, but somehow being barefoot and bare-assed wasn't relevant. He stood and waited.

Then in a flamboyantly exaggerated gesture, the Doctor held out a hand that was thinner than the one Jack remembered. He quirked an eyebrow and grinned. "You want me to say it don't you?" the Doctor asked as Jack paused before slipping his hand into the doctor's.

"Hell yeah." Fingers slid together, palms kissing easily.

"D'you wanna come with me?" the Doctor asked.

The End.

  


**Author's Note:**

> If you are curious, more information on the season of programs about the 18th Century on BBC Four can still be found [here](http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/18thcentury/) They includes links to the page about _"Brummell - This charming man" _and clips from the drama. More information on "Harris's List" (which was an infamous guide book to prostitutes) can be found [ here](http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/2005_20_wed_02.shtml) _The Book of a Thousand and One Nights_ according to [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_One_Thousand_and_One_Nights) was translated into French (1704 - 1717) by Antoine Galland from an earlier compilation that was written in Arabic.
> 
> Although the English/Burton version wasn't published until 1885, I'm assuming a little poetic license and imagining that Jack and Brummell are French literate. Brummell probably was not. The impressions of Brummell (and to a lesser degree Byron) are drawn directly from that dramatisation, and from the novels by Georgette Heyer.  
>   
> Written for the June 2006 _"Anywhere on Earth but London" _challenge on the LJ comm "dwliterotica". I am more than grateful to the list mods for the extension.
> 
> Feedback is always graciously received.


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